Decisions, decisions

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. So says the latest hot polemic exciting transatlantic policy types: Robert Kagan's Paradise and Power, a meditation on how Europeans have grown soft and idealistic (and feminine) while the Yanks remain tough, booted and aware (like real men) of how brutal a place the world can be. According to Kagan, our outlooks have grown so far apart that it's time we stopped pretending we even "occupy the same world". We are from different planets.

Maybe that explains why so many Europeans are not just on the opposite side from the US in the debate over the coming war on Iraq, but why we are not even having the same conversation. While we still agonise over whether or not to go to war - forcing our prime minister to make and remake his case, even if that means taking an hour of questions on MTV, as he will next Friday - the American conversation moved on long ago. With barely a peep of congressional opposition to a military attack against Saddam, and most Democrats reduced to silent compliance, the Washington village has taken it as read, both that war will happen, and that it is justified. Their debate is focusing instead on a different question: what next?

It might be a simple function of power. We sit back making abstract, moral judgments while they, as the nation poised to do the business, concern themselves with practicalities. We are not quite spectators - 40,000 Brits will be involved, after all - but nor do we have the prime spot in the dugout, making the key decisions. Those will be made in Washington.

Whatever the explanation, the gulf between us is real. The op-ed pages of the American papers have the odd thumb-suck on the rights and wrongs of prising Saddam out by force, but their more pressing interest (besides pouring bile on the surrender monkeys of France and Germany) is in the task that will face the great US Army of Liberation once its initial work is done.

There is, for example, an argument about personnel. Should the American governor-general ruling newly free Iraq be a civilian - perhaps the former nuclear weapons inspector, David Kay, or Bush-friendly lawyer Michael Mobbs - or a soldier? Surely a man in a suit would smack less of military occupation, and therefore be the more tactful choice? On the other hand, a uniformed viceroy might repeat the magic worked when Douglas MacArthur oversaw Japan. If that's the precedent, then retired lieutenant general and veteran of the first Gulf war, Jay Garner, would be a frontrunner. Or would it be smarter-to- name, Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American General John Abizaid, amusingly known as "Mad Arab" to his colleagues? Such are the dilemmas preoccupying pre-occupier America.

There are mechanical questions to ponder, too. Which system would work best? If not a formal military occupation, perhaps a Kosovo-style civilian administration? Or an interim government made up, à la Afghanistan, of multiple opposition groups, returned to Iraq after decades of exile? Or would it be more convenient simply to replace Saddam with a new strongman: whether a former Ba'athist suitably made over and rebranded as "pro-western" or an outsider, like Jordan's Prince Hassan, a cousin of Iraq's last king who was assassinated in 1958?

Decisions, decisions. And the US will, barring the most dramatic change of heart by either Saddam Hussein or George Bush, be making them soon. What they will turn on will be more than operational matters of efficiency. They will go instead to the heart of why America is fighting this war.

For if this conflict's chief aim is what the new, second UN resolution claims it to be - the simple disarmament of Iraq - then any postwar settlement would be devised around that objective: perhaps a new, compliant dictator would do that job best. If the goal is the one touted by Tony Blair in recent days as the moral case - namely, liberation from tyranny - then only a fresh, democratic start will do.

If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years.

This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on 17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more important than their relationship with the US. There will be no place on earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing."

If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think again. The founder members of the project, launched in 1997 as a Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, form a rollcall of today's Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis".

It will not be the war itself which will reveal these ultras' true intent. That would be fought the same way whatever the underlying motive: overwhelming force aimed at a swift decapitation of the Iraqi regime. But the postwar occupation will reveal plenty. Then we will know if the hawkish dreamers of the project have indeed taken over US foreign policy. How they remake free Iraq will tell us whether they plan to remake the world.

In other words, this is one debate we cannot afford to sit out. As US commentator Sandra Mackay wrote this month: "Washington's hawks understand that the real risks ... are not in war, but in the peace that follows." It's after victory that the most enduring impact will be felt, whether it be a hated US-led occupation, sparking a fresh round of global terrorism, or the sudden release of Iraq's lethal, internal tensions which Saddam has kept pent-up for 35 years. Kurds could fight Turks for their own state in the north; Shias might team up with Iran for control of the south; everyone may turn on the hated Saddamite Ba'athists in a frenzy of revenge. Iraq will not be like 1940s Japan or Germany, the occupations fondly remembered by the US commentariat. Those were coherent nations; Iraq is an artificial fusion of antagonistic tribes. Victory may be rapid and easy - but that's when the real trouble could start.

About this article

Jonathan Freedland: Decisions, decisions

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 09.28 EST on Wednesday 26 February 2003.
It was last modified at 10.25 EDT on Saturday 4 October 2014.
It was first published at 20.41 EST on Tuesday 25 February 2003.